1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a method for discharging a liquid body which is discharged from a nozzle, a method for manufacturing a color filter, and a method for manufacturing an organic EL device.
2. Related Art
Methods for discharging a liquid body containing a functional material are applied to form films for color filters of liquid crystal displays and organic EL devices, for example. A liquid body discharge device is used to discharge the liquid body. The liquid body discharge device includes a droplet discharge mechanism called a droplet discharge head. The droplet discharge head has a plurality of nozzles arranged in a regular manner. In manufacturing the color filters and organic EL devices, liquid bodies containing functional materials are discharged as droplets to a substrate or the like from the nozzles to form thin films made of the functional materials.
Recently, display devices have been widely used and provided with various sized panels. There have been also demands for the display devices with high image quality. In order to meet the demands, films for color filters and organic EL devices are required to be precisely formed in high density. Accordingly, it has become important that liquid bodies are precisely discharged in high density to substrates of various sizes. In addition, there are demands for manufacturing a multitude of panels from a single large substrate for improving panel productivity to meet an increasing demand for panels of display devices. In this case, various layouts are examined to increase the efficiency of the number of panels per substrate or to manufacture panels having different sizes from a single substrate. Pixel regions, which are minimum units of a region to which the liquid body is discharged, may be arranged such that one pixel region is disposed to make an angle of 90 degrees with another pixel region depending on a layout.
JP-A-2006-187758, for example, discloses such a droplet discharge device that discharges a liquid body from a droplet discharge head to a workpiece (substrate) as a droplet and a method for discharging a droplet in which, while the workpiece is moved in a first direction and a second direction perpendicular to the first direction, the liquid body is discharged from nozzles of the droplet discharge head disposed in a plurality of carriages having been positioned in advance in the second direction to draw a pattern.
The droplet discharge device of the above example discharges the liquid body to a predetermined region on the substrate from the nozzles having been positioned in advance. The nozzles are arranged in a linear manner at a constant pitch. The pixel region serving as the minimum unit region to which the liquid body is discharged is formed in an approximately rectangular shape. Therefore, it is preferable that the pixel region be disposed in a manner setting its long side in parallel with the nozzle line so as to allocate as many nozzles as possible opposed to the pixel region for dispersing variations of a discharge property of the nozzles. However, when pixel regions having different arrangement directions from each other are formed on a substrate in a mixed manner, short sides of some pixel regions are parallel to the nozzle line. In this case, nozzles which can discharge the liquid body to the region are limited, and therefore the liquid body is discharged to a certain part of the region, causing uneven discharge amount of the liquid body. The uneven discharge amount of the liquid body may cause uneven thickness of a thin film formed in the region. The uneven thickness of the thin film such as functional films of color filters of liquid crystal displays and organic EL devices causes deterioration of the image quality of manufactured displays.